The Temptation of Power ||| Hermitcraft Watcher AU

Chapter Two

The air was warm, Grian knew that, it was the hottest day of the year so far, and yet the heat didn't touch him. It was a stranger that passed by him in the street, not stopping for conversation, not knowing who he was, and he didn't know them either. They were unimportant to each other. They exchanged an accidental glance and went on with their day.

He could hear the summer breeze but it didn't run through his hair or brush against his skin. His body felt cold, unaffected by anything past the barriers of his skin. The ice that explored his body and blood and set up camp was created in him and trapped in, the hot air trapped out in just the same way. He felt completely separate to the grassy lands that surrounded him.

The external world and internal mind were independent. He was disconnected from everything, yet also placed directly in the middle. He was an onlooker. He watched. A Watcher, it crept into his mind as an uninvited guest.

It made no difference, but he pulled his winter jumper over his head instead of the usual, thinner summer one. He wore a thick pair of socks in an attempt to warm his numb toes just a tiny bit. He felt like he was high up in a snowy biome suffocating in powdered snow with nothing but a t-shirt and shorts on.

Something in the code of the universe had changed. Something had gone wrong. He no longer felt like his instinct was warning him because the Watchers were already there. He knew it, he could feel it, any doubt - or, hope - that maybe it was something else had dissipated. There was no point lying to himself. Grian knew the Watchers were there, all he could do was wait for them to make their move. 

The cold was a side effect, although he wasn't sure exactly what it was caused by. Maybe the Watchers were doing something to him, maybe this was their way of announcing themselves. Maybe they were scaring him, or trying to convince him to come back in the hope they would stop the cold.

Maybe he was regaining the side of him that was a Watcher.

Once that last thought occurred to him, he was truly scared. If there was one thing he remembered from his days as a half-human-half-Watcher, it was the cold. The cold and the dark.

Maybe was never a certainty, though. But saying it over and over again didn't calm him.

Taking a deep breath in to prepare himself for another cold day, he opened the door and stepped out into the air that barely laid a finger on him. The still-recovering unsettled dirt on the ground stood out as a reminder of why he was out in the first place; to retaliate to Mumbo Jumbo's retaliation. A smirk spread across his face as his plans replayed themselves in his mind.

Even with the Watchers around he needed to get on with life; he couldn't just stop. It simply wouldn't work. Shenanigans were always afoot and people were always there to interrupt what would otherwise, without them, be a very uneventful life. He needed to think things over; find a plan, determine what would happen to his friends, decide what to do. Staying inside, isolated from the world, wouldn't help. He wouldn't be able to keep an eye on things locked away.

Grian tugged his jumper sleeves down as though it helped his body temperature in any way just before arriving at another hermit's base.

"Pssst, pssst, want to join a war?"

* * *

Of course she'd never say no. One reason being that, well, who didn't want in on a bit of mischief? And the other being... it was Grian. Pearl had thought he was dead, or at the very least gone forever, never to be seen again. The day she'd arrived she certainly hadn't expected to see his face. He hadn't spoken to her - properly, at least. He didn't even seem to look at her. He wasn't avoiding her, nor was he paying much mind to her, he was just casual. He didn't recognise her.